Oracle Blog

Random thoughts of a disorganized mind...

Saturday May 07, 2011

After 7 years at http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/, this blog has a new URL: http://blogs.oracle.com/alanc/. I'm sure you can figure out the change to the RSS & Atom feed URL's as well - and apologies if the URL changes in those feeds caused your feed readers to determine the posts were all new, though fortunately, I get around to posting here so rarely these days, there shouldn't have been too many.

I didn't realize it until I went back to look for writing this post, but my blog was live for exactly 7 years on the old site - my first post was April 29, 2004 - the site went live a few days
earlier, but I was traveling for that year's X.Org conference, so didn't get my account setup and post to it until I got there. They froze blogs.sun.com on April 29 this year to start migrating to the new blogs.oracle.com, integrating the Sun & Oracle bloggers, using the same Apache Roller software Sun used.

Three years later, I joined the people looking back for the third anniversary of blogs.sun.com and wrote “So much change in 3 short years - who knows where the next years will lead us?” — certainly I never expected then that three years after that Oracle would have bought Sun. I can only wonder what will be written in April 2014, on what would have been the tenth birthday of blogs.sun.com.

Sunday Jun 10, 2007

I was trying to explain twitter to my wife and the best I could come up with is “kinda like microblogging meets slow-mo IRC,” which didn't make any sense to her. After a bit more trying, “like a web forum with short posts” made more sense to her, but my personal dislike of web forums kept me from thinking of them like that. Fortunately more prolific and more widely read bloggers than I have spent a lot of time describing twitter and it's impact, so you can go read them for a better description.

Sunday Apr 29, 2007

Today is actually the third anniversary of my first public blog post (though as you can see, I later migrated some earlier posts from my now abandoned internal blog to it), as I was traveling to the first X.Org Developer's Conference on the day of the initial launch, but signed up once I was there (back when signing up was simply e-mailing Will Snow to ask for an account), and started posting from there.

In my first post, I worried I wouldn't be able to find enough things to blog about - now I know I have too much to blog about, and time to write it all up is the limit - I was posting the changes in each Solaris Express release for a while, and more recently, the X ChangeLogs for each Solaris Nevada build, but both fell behind after a few months. I've got a list of links to other blogs and interesting sites that I want to post that keeps growing longer and longer as I fail to take enough time to post them here. I wasn't sure I would even get this post done during the b.s.c birthday celebration.

As some of the other bloggers mentioned, the effect has gone beyond just providing a way for any employee to post - the company's culture has changed. No longer do we complain about hearing about new announcements first in the press - blogs are now considered a crucial part of
many announcement plans, especially around OpenSolaris, and bloggers are briefed in advance. I joked with Ben Rockwood at the SVOSUG last week about how much he's been yanking Sun's chain lately - how long ago would it be unimaginable that the CEO, VP's and Chief Architect get personally involved when a sysadmin at a startup complained about issues with Sun?

So much change in 3 short years - who knows where the next years will lead us?

Sunday Jan 22, 2006

Going: Richard Giles

Sad to see Richard Giles leaving Sun. I got to meet Richard in person in 2000 when he came to the US Sun offices. At the time, he was one of the first people in the field to spend much time with the then-new Xinerama feature in Xsun, and he stopped by to talk to the engineering team. He also created an internal Xinerama FAQ that helped save us from having to re-answer commonly asked questions from early users and helped everyone keep track of the various patches needed to Xsun and to other Sun applications to get everything working well together with Xinerama on. His enthusiasm will be missed at Sun, but I'm sure it will serve him well on his new projects and wish him luck there.

I almost wrote that Richard was Sun's first podcaster, for his I/O Podcast, but I suppose first external podcaster would be a better description, because Scott McNealy has been doing the internal equivalent of a podcast since before anyone hooked them to RSS and called them podcasts. About once a month for years now, Scott has recorded The McNealy Report to update people inside Sun on what's going on inside the company. Styled as a radio show, it often includes interviews with partners, customers, Sun executives, or internal project leaders. It's been going so long that it was once available for subscription as cassette tapes for listening in the car - now it's mainly distributed inside Sun as online audio. (Personally, I prefer to read the transcripts, since I can read faster and my brain just seems to absorb printed text better than listening - which drives my wife crazy sometimes.)

Coming: Thomas Haynes

I was amused to see a new Sun employee posting how much he liked the strict processes employed in his group at Sun compared to his previous employer. Especially when compared to another Sun blogger posting "Why I don't believe in code review", it makes for interesting food for thought. Of course both of these make the same mistake, talking about the "Sun" process, when it's really just the process used in their groups, and different parts of Sun have different standards for code review. Not even all of Solaris operates under the same rules, and our group is even learning to deal with the very different processes of the open source X.Org source tree vs. our Solaris X source trees. Somehow I don't see us all coming to agreement on how much code review is needed anytime soon.

(The other thing that drew me to the post was the title "Ex-NetApp and Damn Proud of It." It struck me that while I used to know lots of NetApp employees, I actually know a lot more Ex-NetApp'ers now than the few people I know still at NetApp. It's not that NetApp is a bad place to work - Fortune clearly thinks it's a good place - it's just that most of the people I used to know at NetApp were in the customer support groups, and when NetApp decided to move it's main support center from California to North Carolina - they chose staying with their families, homes, and Bay Area lifestyle over following their job across the country. A bunch of them ended up at TCP acceleration startup RiverBed.)

Friday May 13, 2005

Elsewhere I noted that the movement towards greater transparency and customer communications via efforts like blogs.sun.com are a bit strange at the moment since they are both pushing up from the bottom of the org chart, with many engineers and other "individual contributors" participating, and pushing down from the top, with people like Jonathan Schwartz and John Fowler participating, but hasn't met in the middle yet, with the layers of middle management still out of the picture - where many of the decisions people want to know about are made and best explained. (For instance, you can find my blog here, and that of the VP I work for, Glenn Weinberg, but you won't find the manager I report to, the senior manager he reports to, or the director he reports to (who in turn reports to Glenn).) Perhaps it will just take time and growing numbers above and below to squeeze them out of the conference rooms and out here with the rest of us...

Recently, the gap has closed, with the two directors our group works for starting blogs — Andy Roach of the Solaris x86 group, and Stephen Harpster of the OpenSolaris effort. (At Sun, we find org charts that look like the traditional tree form to be boring, so ours are much more complex graphs, which is why my boss reports to two directors - a "solid line" report and a "dotted line" report.)

They're not the only new blogs springing up on blogs.sun.com though, and there's a bunch of new ones from those of us working down in the trenches, digging through the code. Those I'm particularly watching:

If all you had to go on was e-mail, you might think he's one of the quieter members of Sun's X11 team, but no one who has met him in person would make that mistake. Jay has done a lot of work on Xsun's Xinerama and power management code, and most recently has been working on delivering the Xorg 6.8.2 server for the Linux release of Sun's Java Desktop System.

Randy works around the corner from me, and we chat a lot in the hall. I'm never quite sure what he's working on because he's got his fingers in so many parts of Solaris - the webmin packages included in Solaris 10, the initial JDS release for Solaris x86 last year, network drivers, power management, and every time I look it seems like he's working on something new. And when he's not talking about what he's cooking up next for Solaris, he'll tell you about the beer he's brewing.